@inproceedings{khalid-etal-2025-bridging,
    title = "Bridging the Bandwidth Gap: A Mixed Band Telephonic {U}rdu {ASR} Approach with Domain Adaptation for Banking Applications",
    author = "Khalid, Ayesha  and
      Adeeba, Farah  and
      Sehar, Najm Ul  and
      Hussain, Sarmad",
    editor = "Sarveswaran, Kengatharaiyer  and
      Vaidya, Ashwini  and
      Krishna Bal, Bal  and
      Shams, Sana  and
      Thapa, Surendrabikram",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025)",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.chipsal-1.17/",
    pages = "172--184",
    abstract = "The accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems is influenced by the quality and context of speech signals, particularly in telephonic environments prone to errors like channel drops and noise, leading to higher Word Error Rates (WER). This paper presents the development of a large vocabulary Urdu ASR system for telephonic speech, based on a corpus of 445 speakers from diverse domains. The corpus, annotated at the sentence level, is used to train and evaluate GMM-HMM and chain Time-Delay Neural Network (TDNN) models on a 10-hour test set. Results show that the TDNN model outperforms GMM-HMM. Mixing narrowband and wideband speech further reduces WER. The test sets are also evaluated for the pre-trained model Whisper for performance comparison. Additionally, system adaptation for the banking domain with a specialized lexicon and language model demonstrates the system{'}s potential for domain-specific applications."
}